We seem to disagree what is expensive formats here. I find $2oo for a blu ray player acceptable when you consider what you get in return.

I'm afraid so. I'm not going to play the format games anymore. I did it with Laserdic in the early 90s and I did it again with HD-DVD. Besides, Blu-ray discs average about twice the price of regular DVD and I believe the future will be in data streaming, anyway.

In the meantime, I'll settle for upscale DVD or the Xvid or DivX formats. I have no problem with that.

to resurrect this a bit, the problem i have with hardware players (any sort of those, be it dvd. br, or some hdd with playback capability) is they're not as flexible as pc with ffdshow as a tool to improve video quality.

none of them really has sharpenign methods ffdshow has, none has adding noise and other tweaks i can use on pc to improve quality.
also, pcs are quaite cheap by now, so i would always invest 200 or 300$ to build a pc, rather than buy a player.

but i do understand most people won't be so pedantic, but i really was sold the minute i saw what ffdshow can do, looong time ago. makes no sense for me to go to hardware players esp. for divx or xvid (or other) media from web that usually needs some improvement upon playback.

though i value content over quality, still i will always prefer pc hooked to tv (pc monitors are too small) because i just can get better quality that way.
also, pc software players can do things hardware players can't.
scrubbing thru timeline is faster, i can jump anywhere i want, i can jump in any step i prefer, i can zoom easilly, i can frame advance much easier (with mouse wheel and zoom player) etc.etc. just an "ol" pc hooked to tv and few programs to run it all.

hello all
I arrive after the battle, but maybe it'll even help some of you whether for PC or MAC.
I even tried some converter "Episode 5.2" I personally find it a little "gas plant, for software to 990$", short after all these tests I have returned to "MPEG Streamclip" which is free and efficient, you just load the codec "MPEG 2 to 30$" it opens the DVD converted into
of mulple format "avi, wmv, mp4, etc ..." and some other very interesting features (discovered on the publisher's site) which I will join the link.
In case you want to drill down.
Regards

DVD encoding has been a PITA in the past. You had to be a doom9.org freak and use several tool chains. Handbrake does pretty much everything for you and it will get real good results even if you are no expert in video editing. And it is easy to use.

There are some caveats and basics, though.

Basic premise: I'm not talking about BluRay encoding, since this VEF. Most DVDs will be original VHS releases and probably not have the best quality.
I'll try to get the best quality to store the video on a PC or a NAS.
Videosize is not that important to me, although I do want to shrink the files, otherwise I could just keep the original files. But since we don't have reduce files to 700MB anymore (to fit on a SVCD), size is not the main issue when ripping/encoding. There are good streaming solutions to watch movies on the big telly.

1. You do want to copy the content to hdd first. If this doesn't work with normal OS copy, you can use MakeMKV.
2. You have to find out if the source is progressive or interlaced. If it is interlaced you will get combing, which will reduce the quality big time, if you don't deinterlace.
There are multiple tools to analyze video files. Mediainfo is pretty good and also cross plattform. If you are residing in the US, there should be usually no interlaced videos.

Handbrake Settings:1. Picture: Set Anamorphic to "strict". (We keep the original ratio)2. Filters: If you have an interlaced source, you do have to de-interlace.
There are 2 reasonable options: deinterlace with slow setting, or use decomb with slow/default. What's better may depend on the source. Both are based on the best deinterlace filter.
Denoise should be set to hqdn3d and medium. Deblock to 5. Will look better on a 1080p TV. 3. Container: Choose MKV (Matroska).4. Codec: Use H.264Framerate: Constant quality. FPS to "Same as Source" and constant Framerate.Quality: Use constant quality. Variable bitrate will ensure an overall bitrate, but you will lose quality in specific scenes. Note: With constant quality you can not calculate the size! But it is in general the better option if you aim for quality. To estimate size, there is still the preview option. Optimize Video: You do want to choose "Very slow" for best quality (will take time to encode). The slower you encode, the better the quality will be.Quality Settings is in general good at RF 20. You can go lower to get a better quality, but the file size will also grow. After RF 16 there will be a lot of diminishing returns. If the size is to big, you could go also slightly higher than RF 20. If you care about size, raise RF until it is fine for you.

x264 Tune: In general you choose "film". If your source has a lot of grain, then use "grain". If you want to encode Slideshows select "still image". Other tunes can be ignored.H.264 Profile: Main is ok, for best quality select "High profile".H.264 level: This is related to the resolution you want to encode. For DVDs select 3.1. Wiki has a table about the different levels here.5. Audio: I leave that up to you. But I don't need AC3 Dolby in porn flicks.
MP3@160 bitrate is pretty much ok. AAC is probably better.6. Subtitles: Usually porn doesn't come with subtitles, so we can skip that.7. Chapters: It's up to you, if you want to keep them and if your player does support it.
If you use VLC on a PC it is nice.

Note that there is no perfect setting that fits for every video. And I'm not claiming that my settings are the best. There is also the conflict about file size and quality. You have to find it out for yourselves and for your video.

You should use preview to test. Previews will be deleted, though. But there is a trick: While watching the preview, copy it with your OS and save it into another folder. This way you can compare them later. And you can estimate the filesize from the preview size.